Film Review: Silent Wedding

Scene from Silent Wedding. Photo supplied.

Silent Wedding
Director: Horatiu Malaele
Cast: Meda Victor, Alexandru Potocean, Valentin Teodosiu, Alexandru Bindea, Ioana Anastasia Anton, Luminita Gheorghiu
Rating: (M)
2 stars (out of 5)

Reviewed by Mark Orton.

It's never good when you set out to write about a film and draw a blank.

In this instance it's not due to blandness or inactivity, quite the opposite.

Silent Wedding, set in the Romanian countryside in 1953, is so barmy, just knowing where to start is difficult.

Director Horatiu Malaele sets up a cast of rural villagers without bothering to engineer anything resembling a plot.

As the title suggests, there will be a wedding, and it will be silent, but only near the end do we get any hint of why that is.

When the wedding between young lovers Iancu and Mara finally rolls around, a Soviet soldier arrives to inform the wedding party there can be no celebrations due to the death of Joseph Stalin.

Cue the film's most humorous moments, as the village cunningly proceeds anyway.

Silent Wedding is directed more like a song-and-dance stage performance than a film.

The cast of villagers move about the set with the type of choreography that is impressive but gets a little tiresome as the slapstick gags mount up. Perhaps additional meaning has been lost in translation.

Feature-length Romanian films are a novelty, and after Nicolae Ceausescu's totalitarian rule, it is little wonder that given the resources to make an all-singing and dancing epic you would do just that.

But realising this doesn't make Silent Wedding any more entertaining or meaningful for non-Romanians.

Best thing: The colour palette. Even when the film loses its way, the images are still mesmerisingly beautiful. Worst thing: Absence of a coherent story line.

See it with: Romanian plum brandy. The film might make a bit more sense and it might put you on the same wavelength as the cast.